In the name of Hype Studies e.V. I am happy to announce the start of our monthly online Colloquium.
We kick off with Sandeep Mertia and his presentation:
Dreamy Stacks: Digital Public Infrastructure, Futurity, and Failure in Startup India
Friday 16th October 2pm CET.
Free for all to join:
Attend: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/3482356027193916?p=20JroYLBCDd69gF7J5
Room ID: 348 235 602 719 391 6
Passcode: hL7eh9fK
Dreamy Stacks: Digital Public Infrastructure, Futurity, and Failure in Startup India
In this talk, based on a recently published article,
“Dreamy Stacks” (Science, Technology, & Human
Values, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01622439261485054),
I ask what hype does when it becomes the state’s
architecture of future-making. India’s Digital Public
Infrastructures (DPIs) are increasingly held up as a
model for the world. Yet India Stack is as much a
dream as a material infrastructure for tethering
data-driven governance to entrepreneurial aspirations.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic and archival
research, I show how the post-Aadhaar state presents
itself as a stack of data layers promising inclusion,
interoperability, and innovation, even as these
infrastructures remain fragmented, failure-prone, and
dependent on public subsidy. Ethnographically focusing
on Rajasthan Stack, a regional analogue of India
Stack, I trace the gap between promissory visions and
lived experience, and show how start-ups, incubators,
and data centers re-spatialize techno-futurity beyond
metropolitan centers. Rather than treating hype as a
distortion to be corrected, I argue that it is
constitutive of DPI’s emergence and circulation.
Against universalist accounts of platform capitalism
and data colonialism that center scale, seamlessness,
and stable data/value relations, Dreamy Stacks
theorizes a speculative, state-mediated architecture
of futurity and failure in most of the world.
Sandeep Mertia is an Assistant Professor of STS at Stevens Institute of Technology. His publications include Lives of Data (2020) and Putting Data Justice in Context (with Tone Walford and Catarina Morawska, forthcoming).
Best
Jascha